Lives of the Poets Part 9

Of his more elevated occasional poems, there is, perhaps, none that does not deserve commendation. In the verses to Fletcher, we have an image that has since been often adopted[24]:

But whither am I stray'd? I need not raise Trophies to thee from other men's dispraise; Nor is thy fame on lesser ruins built, Nor need thy juster t.i.tle the foul guilt

Of eastern kings, who, to secure their reign, Must have their brothers, sons, and kindred, slain.

After Denham, Orrery, in one of his prologues,

Poets are sultans, if they had their will; For ev'ry author would his brother kill.

And Pope,

Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne.

But this is not the best of his little pieces: it is excelled by his poem to Fanshaw, and his elegy on Cowley.

His praise of Fanshaw's version of Guarini contains a very sprightly and judicious character of a good translator:

That servile path thou n.o.bly dost decline, Of tracing word by word and line by line.

Those are the labour'd births of slavish brains, Not the effect of poetry but pains; Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords No flight for thoughts, but poorly stick at words, A new and n.o.bler way thou dost pursue, To make translations and translators too, They but preserve the ashes; thou the flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame.

The excellence of these lines is greater, as the truth which they contain was not, at that time, generally known.

His poem on the death of Cowley was his last, and, among his shorter works, his best performance: the numbers are musical, and the thoughts are just.

Cooper's Hill is the work that confers upon him the rank and dignity of an original author. He seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated _local poetry_, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation.

To trace a new scheme of poetry, has, in itself, a very high claim to praise, and its praise is yet more, when it is apparently copied by Garth and Pope[25]; after whose names little will be gained by an enumeration of smaller poets, that have left scarcely a corner of the island not dignified either by rhyme or blank verse.

Cooper's Hill, if it be maliciously inspected, will not be found without its faults. The digressions are too long, the morality too frequent, and the sentiments, sometimes, such as will not bear a rigorous inquiry.

The four verses, which, since Dryden has commended them, almost every writer for a century past has imitated, are generally known:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.

The lines, are, in themselves, not perfect; for most of the words, thus artfully opposed, are to be understood simply on one side of the comparison, and metaphorically on the other; and, if there be any language which does not express intellectual operations by material images, into that language they cannot be translated. But so much meaning is comprised in so few words; the particulars of resemblance are so perspicaciously collected, and every mode of excellence separated from its adjacent fault by so nice a line of limitation; the different parts of the sentence are so accurately adjusted; and the flow of the last couplet is so smooth and sweet; that the pa.s.sage, however celebrated, has not been praised above its merit. It has beauty peculiar to itself, and must be numbered among those felicities which cannot be produced at will by wit and labour, but must rise unexpectedly in some hour propitious to poetry.

He appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emanc.i.p.ating translation from the drudgery of counting lines, and interpreting single words. How much this servile practice obscured the clearest, and deformed the most beautiful parts of the ancient authors, may be discovered by a perusal of our earlier versions; some of them are the works of men well qualified, not only by critical knowledge, but by poetical genius, who yet, by a mistaken ambition of exactness, degraded, at once, their originals and themselves.

Denham saw the better way, but has not pursued it with great success.

His versions of Virgil are not pleasing; but they taught Dryden to please better. His poetical imitation of Tully on Old Age has neither the clearness of prose, nor the sprightliness of poetry.

The "strength of Denham," which Pope so emphatically mentions, is to be found in many lines and couplets, which convey much meaning in few words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk.

On the Thames.

Though with those streams he no resemblance hold, Whose foam is amber, and their gravel gold; His genuine and less guilty wealth t' explore, Search not his bottom, but survey his sh.o.r.e.

On Strafford.

His wisdom such, at once, it did appear Three kingdoms' wonder, and three kingdoms' fear.

While single he stood forth, and seem'd, although Each had an army, as an equal foe; Such was his force of eloquence to make The hearers more concern'd than he that spake: Each seem'd to act that part he came to see, And none was more a looker-on than he; So did he move our pa.s.sions, some were known To wish, for the defence, the crime their own.

Now private pity strove with public hate, Reason with rage, and eloquence with fate.

On Cowley.

To him no author was unknown, Yet what he wrote was all his own; Horace's wit, and Virgil's state, He did not steal, but emulate!

And, when he would like them appear, Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear.

As one of Denham's princ.i.p.al claims to the regard of posterity arises from his improvement of our numbers, his versification ought to be considered. It will afford that pleasure which arises from the observation of a man of judgment naturally right, forsaking bad copies by degrees, and advancing towards a better practice, as he gains more confidence in himself.

In his translation of Virgil, written when he was about twenty-one years old, may be still found the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse to verse:

Then all those Who in the dark our fury did escape, Returning, know our borrow'd arms, and shape, And differing dialect; then their numbers swell And grow upon us; first Choroebus fell Before Minerva's altar; next did bleed Just Ripheus, whom no Trojan did exceed In virtue, yet the G.o.ds his fate decreed.

Then Hypanis and Dymas, wounded by Their friends; nor thee, Pantheus, thy piety, Nor consecrated mitre, from the same Ill fate could save; my country's funeral flame And Troy's cold ashes I attest, and call To witness for myself, that in their fall No foes, no death, nor danger, I declin'd, Did, and deserv'd no less, my fate to find.

From this kind of concatenated metre he afterwards refrained, and taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets; which has, perhaps, been with rather too much constancy pursued.

This pa.s.sage exhibits one of those triplets which are not unfrequent in this first essay, but which it is to be supposed his maturer judgment disapproved, since, in his latter works, he has totally forborne them.

His rhymes are such as seem found without difficulty, by following the sense; and are, for the most part, as exact, at least, as those of other poets, though now and then the reader is shifted off with what he can get:

O how _transform'd!_ How much unlike that Hector, who _return'd_ Clad in Achilles' spoils!

And again:

From thence a thousand lesser poets _sprung_ Like petty princes from the fall of _Rome_.

Sometimes the weight of rhyme is laid upon a word too feeble to sustain it:

Troy confounded falls From all her glories: if it might have stood By any power, by this right hand it _shou'd_.

--And though my outward state misfortune _hath_ Deprest thus low, it cannot reach my faith.

--Thus, by his fraud and our own faith o'ercome, A feigned tear destroys us, against _whom_ Tydides nor Achilles could prevail, Nor ten years' conflict, nor a thousand sail.

He is not very careful to vary the ends of his verses; in one pa.s.sage the word _die_ rhymes three couplets in six.

Most of these petty faults are in his first productions, when he was less skilful, or, at least, less dexterous in the use of words; and though they had been more frequent, they could only have lessened the grace, not the strength of his composition. He is one of the writers that improved our taste, and advanced our language, and whom we ought, therefore, to read with grat.i.tude, though, having done much, he left much to do.

[Footnote 22: In Hamilton's memoirs of count Grammont, sir John Denham is said to have been seventy-nine, when he married Miss Brook, about the year 1664; according to which statement he was born in 1585. But Dr.

Johnson, who has followed Wood, is right. He entered Trinity college, Oxford, at the age of sixteen, in 1631, as appears by the following entry, which I copied from the matriculation book.

Trin. Coll.

"1631. Nov. 18. Johannes Denham, Ess.e.x. filius J. Denham de Horsley-parva in com. praedict. militis, annos natus 16. MALONE".]